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"A meditation on the seven works of spiritual mercy"
June 27: new and added today to alternative website -- An attempt at a more "inspirational"
type of writing -- reflections on the seven spiritual mercies -- from Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) -- posted
at link (above).
June 27, 2005
The Last Metaphysical Right
I apologize to whatever dwindling remnant of my readership that may still exist for the decline in my postings to this
site. In these days of mourning for an America that was, the activity of posting yet another obituary begins to seem futile.
The latest outrage is, of course, the recent Supreme Court ruling declaring that rich people have the right to seize property
from poor people. Of course, that is not what the ruling said, but that is what it effectively means.
So what else is new? The law of the American State is the law of the strong, and the wolves are descending upon the hapless
sheep because there is no other economic game in town.Our soil is depleted, our factories are deserted, millions are
unemployed, and the debt ever deepens. St. Augustine reminds us in The City of God that "evil has no positive
nature," -- which means to say, evil cannot stand on its own, it must always be a predator on the good. "Good can exist without
evil, but evil cannot exist without good, because the natures in which evil exist, insofar as they are natures, are good."
Americans should pay attention to this last sentence, because Manichaeanism is tearing the land apart. The latest outbreak
of this Manichaean heresy -- spirit without body -- is this splitting-apart of the notion of liberty from the sanctity of
private property. Now I would be the first to agree that the right to property has often been abused in our country. Nevertheless,
freedom has to be anchored in something, otherwise it ceases to mean anything. The right and protection of private property
has been one of the chief safeguards of American liberty. This is what Richard Weaver meant when he called private property
"the last metaphysical right." I believe he meant this precisely in an anti-Manichaean sense: it is metaphysical not because
it is 'spiritual' but because it is anchored in the tangible, the traditional, the customary.
St. Augustine's statement about the inherent goodness in "natures" reminds us of one of the most fundamental Catholic
teaching: that spirit and body are interconnected, that the tangible and the intangible must be viewed as a unity. Not so
in America, where the body is either despised (e.g.. the feminists, sex-change operators and genetic manipulators) or
glorified (Hollywood, porn industry, and traffic in body parts). In both extremes "natures" are not seen as something good
and to be accepted, but to be fought, overthrown, triumphed over. Americans, in thus declaring a War Against Nature, failed
to see how the later campaigns would come down. The first sortie in this campaign is that the big box stores and the
'developers' will decide that your property could really be a lot more useful to them. As one commentator noted, this
is the ideology of Communism put into the service of hyper-capitalism.
Welcome to Moloch, a.k.a. the Revolutionary State, a.k.a. management by Creative Destruction. Do Americans
get it yet?
June 14, 2005
Free Thought, Free Love, Free Money and a Free Country:
All Down the Drain
Several things have converged for me this ripe June morning. Wasn’t June
14 the start date of some War? – or perhaps I am confusing it with August 14th. Does it matter? We in the
West are always fighting wars. But what matter? Wars against terrorism, poverty, AIDS, cancer, the environment, smoking, the
family, literacy, the economy, the fetus, marriage… endless wars define our horizon and fill our days. Yet they are
results, only results. Everybody who can think even in a little is going crying like Wee Willie Winkie in search of causes,
and the Internet is full of everyone’s causes, hung up like washing. Chesterton thought that one of the fruits of religious
authority is to prevent the human intellect from destroying itself. As he wrote in his book, Orthodoxy – ". The
chief mark and element of insanity… [is] reason used without root, reason in the void." He also notes that "The more
the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself." Unutterable stagnation and entropy
seems to be the lot of people who refuse to think. Or as one wit put it elsewhere, I don’t know who – when we
stopped believing in Hell we began to create it on earth.
Today’s reflections were prompted by Jim Kunstler’s
latest Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle – "California the Tragic" – "I've
been on a long book publicity road trip around California, with a side trip to Seattle on Thursday, and it's hard not to feel
hopeless about this country after being here…. Which is that what you see in California is a society with a tragic destiny.
I was all over the Bay Area earlier in the week, from San Francisco to Silicon Valley to Berkeley and even down to Santa Cruz,
and that was bad enough, But then I got down to Los Angeles on Friday and have been in a state of pathological reflex nausea
ever since… life here is all about cars and it will never not be about cars -- until the reality of our oil predicament
falls on the hapless public like a hammer of God and the people of California die for their fucking cars in their fucking
cars and over their fucking cars. I understand that the scene here is not qualitatively different from Dallas, Orlando, Atlanta,
Northern Virginia, Miami, New Jersey and other cloacal hot-spots of the world's highest standard of living."
And then there was George Ure’s Urban Survival website, where he mentions
that Richard McClendon, a website writer unknown to me, was shutting down his site. McClendon writes to Ure: "Since 1996 I
have been unemployed twice, 3 years in 1996 and for the last 8 months. The first time exhausted my saving and retirement as
well as my health insurance. After the last 8 months, I am now down to my last 30days worth of income/cash meeting my monthly
obligations…"
I checked the link and found that McClendon is a writer on economic affairs. There
are some articles posted on his site, written by himself and others, the most recent one entitled "The Economic Shell Game
Will Go On Until Foreigners Cut Us Off." It’s written by Doug McIntosh.He says:
I have no idea how much longer this fiscal farce of endless debt,
endless gimmicks and endless lies can continue. But I will tell you this dear reader, my judgment is our economic doom will
come from outside our borders. I feel the economic shell game will go on until the foreigners cut us off. The day is coming
when they will kick our drunken butts out of the Funny Fiat Money Saloon and throw us out into a mud puddle….
The USA money should say, "I spend; therefore, I am." I hold certain
economic truths to be self-evident. The reason they are self-evident is because history is littered with the bones of those
who ignored them, mocked them or listened to experts telling them they don't matter. It is pathetic. It is disgusting and
most of all, it is useless for the USA to pretend it isn't bankrupt. It is like an aristocrat pawning the family jewels to
pay gambling debts. We are undone economically.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Later, there was another very interesting paragraph:
I do not see the issue as a political issue at all. It is an economic
issue, deficits and debt, embedded in a moral issue. By that I mean endless debt and credit and the lies and fraud that support
it are moral failures of the American political system. Moral failures of the leadership elite and the general populace. And
it is my personal view, this full faith and credit crap, yes crap, will go down in flames when the foreigners make a moral
judgment about the American economy. The point of all this debt and budget deficits is the ABILITY to repay it. Further, the
moral willingness to repay it. And finally, the mental will to repay it. The core issue on the budget deficit, the economy
and the Federal debt is a moral judgment on whether the United States will pay off its debts. And it is this single, ruthless,
brutal statement that will take out the US government, take out the US economy and take out the United States as a superpower.
This is isn't about economics in the conventional sense of the word. It is about how moral failure expresses itself in economic
terms and has political and military results… I have come to the conclusion the people, the leadership and the elite
really do think they can keep this debt ceiling fantasy going on endlessly. If you ask the question at what point does the
ceiling become a floor, the eyes glaze over.
From:
http://home.flash.net/~rhmjr/c50609.html#headline%20text
The Enlightenment is over, folks. You might say it was the attempt to separate
the natural and the moral, reason from faith, nature from man, the economy from ecology. Free Thought metastasized into Free
Love which metastasized into Free Money. What a delusion! And yet it was delusion powerfully reinforced by the historical
event of the Discovery of America, which was, like, a free country! I mean this great big gigantic continent chock-full of
natural resources to consume and destroy, and only a few Indian tribes hanging around! What a boon! Add Cheap Oil to this
fetid mix … and what do we have but the notion of Economy as Void, with all the nations of the world clamoring and cowering
beneath the hail of our defecations?
Well, some people see through it. And maybe the rest of the world
will, in time . . . if there is an "in time" or an "end time" for us. The point, the radical point whose outlines I am beginning
to discern in all this mist, is that of all the institutions in the West, only the Roman Catholic Church is uncorrupted in
its moral core. Dr. John P. Hubert is calling for "A Catholic Lay-Driven Re-evangelization of Western Culture" – for
the "Formation of a Comprehensive World View Apostolate." He writes:
’It is apparent to all thoughtful orthodox Catholics that
once Christian Western Culture has devolved into a virulent form of neo-pagan secularism… It is marked by moral relativism
combined with utilitarianism, materialism including largely unregulated free-market capitalism, wild inequitable consumption
of precious resources and the goods of production and a dangerous version of rabid personal "freedom" in which truth itself
is sacrificed at the "altar" of the autonomous self which pursues various "preferences" in the name of "human rights."
…One realizes how tragic it is that the West did not follow
the Magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church in the 20th century including the advice found in Humani vitae and
the concerns voiced by Pope Pius XII regarding the effects of instrumenting human sexuality such that the body became only
an object to be utilized as if it were separate from the integrated total person … Put more simply, the answer
to 21st century cultural implosion is an orthodox Catholic conversion/re-conversion of the West. A conversion to
generic Christianity would be helpful but not to the degree that the assumption of Catholic orthodoxy would. Generic Christianity
simply lacks too many of the necessary doctrinal riches and centuries worth of praxis that only the Catholic Church in all
it fullness has to offer…
The practical dilemma we face in bringing Catholic orthodoxy to
the West is that our neo-pagan culture has an absolute aversion to it and for good reason. The two cannot exist harmoniously
in direct opposition and as competitors for cultural ascendancy (Worldview supremacy). They are fundamentally and irrevocably
contradictory in all three important elements which serve to define "worldview"; epistemology, metaphysics and morality. The
radical neo-pagan secularists are of course well aware of this. They presently control most of the media, academia, the entertainment
industry and much of the political power apparatus. Thus, Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular has become
the only entity against which overt bigotry is allowed and fostered. A realistic conversion/reconversion of the West to orthodox
Catholicism requires the existence of an entity guided by the concept/notion of a Comprehensive Catholic World View which
can intellectually compete with the reigning materialist neo-pagan hedonistic paradigm now in the forefront of public awareness
thanks to the media, entertainment and much of academia’s constant support of same. (From TCR News -- http://tcrnews2.com/genworld.html -- Traditional Catholic Reflections)
Hey, when and where's the new Apostolate? Sign me up.
Tidbits by Santayana on Protestantism
June 7, 2005
My thanks to a reader, who sent me the following quotations from the philosopher George Santayana about Protestantism.
It seems that I am not the only person in this world who has begun to experience serious doubts about the spiritual validity
of Protestant Christianity. My doubts and questions have put me at odds with people I like, and I have been ashamed at my
own tactlessness and "friction." Of all the things one can be distressed about - and there are many things to be distressed
about today - why go after Protestantism? Aren't there matters more pressing and urgent?
Well, yes and no. The truth to me seems to be that American society is sliding into entropic collapse. The economy is on
life-support of cheap oil, the rationalism of the intellectual culture is mirrored by the egotism and delight in perversion
of the imagination culture, there is no investment in a social future, the super-rich are jetting into the statosphere while
families and communities sink into economic and spiritual poverty, our landscape is an obscene horror built to the requirements
of the automobile. Or do you want to talk about factory farming, decline of topsoil, environmental degradation, the decay
of civilization, the absence of independednt thought, the militarization of finance, the mechanization and suffocation of
all spontaneous life by a cancerous government metastasizing into totalitarian control? Which of these cheerful subjects will
you choose to pursue as your pet peeve and chief grievance, in your lonely way into solitary witness and mute martyrdom?
So it seems to me that Protestantism is about as close to the bedrock as you are going to get to all these diverse manifestations
of failing heart and mind and sterile action. And if I express my doubts and distresses about modern America in the form of
a complaint with the Protestant religion, it is because I am beginning to think that our sterility is owing to a failure to
cherish truth with all our hearts and minds and souls. If we are to complain, we should complain about something important.
We should think about God and our souls. The entropy that is freezing our will in the wasteland and that threatens our souls
with a new Ice Age creeps over us because we think we can live without truth. So we stuff ourselves with substitutes and let
Washington, WalMart and Wall Street run the show.
Soon, there will be no place to stand. No ground, only pavement; and no air, only exhaust. And everything you are and
hope for and look at will have to be paid for in cash or credit.
So let Santayana have his say. Somehow the Catholic in his Spaniard soul spoke after all through the skepticism and materialism
he lightly professed in his career at Harvard. He swam in the little stream with the Protestants, but somehow knew the
difference between that backwater of the Christian faith and its steady Catholicized Mississippian heart rolling through
the continents of time.
From Dominations and Powers
"In strictness one might say that the ultimate Protestant ideal is to have no outward or specific religion at all --
no priests, churches, theology, Scripture or Sabbath, and indeed, no God. This position has not been reached by most Protestants,
but I think that the nearer they come to it the more Protestant they are. It is the position of the great German idealists,
who have brought the Protestant spirit to its perfect and most speculative expression."
Dominations '72 at 166-67
(How Religion May Become
Political).
From Reason in Common Sense
"The tenets of Protestant bodies
are notoriously varied and on principle subject to change. There is hardly a combination of tradition and spontaneity which
has not been tried in some quarter. If we think, however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that in Protestantism
myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation to reality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth has
become its substratum. Religion no longer reveals divine personalities, future rewards, and tenderer Elysian consolations;
nor does it seriously propose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be shortened by prescribed devotions.
It merely gives the real world an ideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on supernatural grounds. The consequence
is that the most pious can give an unvarnished description of things. Even immortality and the idea of God are submitted,
in liberal circles, to scientific treatment. On the other hand, it would be hard to conceive a more inveterate obsession than
that which keeps the attitude of these same minds inappropriate to the objects they envisage. They have accepted natural conditions;
they will not accept natural ideals. The Life of Reason has no existence for them, because, although its field is clear, they
will not tolerate any human or finite standard of value, and will not suffer extant interests, which can alone guide them
in action or judgment, to define the worth of life."
Common Sense '24 at 12-13 (Introduction).
From
Egotism in German Philosophy
"For favourable as Protestantism is to investigation and learning, it is almost incompatible
with clearness of thought and fundamental freedom of attitude."
Egotism '40 at 29 (The Protestant Heritage).
From
Egotism in German Philosophy
"The rebellion of the heathen soul is unmistakable in the Reformation, but it is not
recognised in this simple form, because those who feel that it was justified do not dream that it was heathen, and those who
see it was heathen will not admit that it was justified. Externally, of course, it was an effort to recover the original essence
of Christianity; [but it] was simply the inertia of established prejudice that made people use tradition to correct tradition;
until the whole substance of tradition, worn away by that internal friction, should be dissolved, and impulse
and native
genius should assert themselves unimpeded."
Egotism '40 at 151. (Heathenism).
From Soliloquies in
England--
"My instinct is to go and stand under the cross, with the monks and the crusaders, far away from these Jews
and Protestants who adore the world and who govern it."
Catholic Convivium
June 4, 2005
Perhaps this will be the start of a "Catholic blog," of which I find many on the Internet.It is a hopeful sign; Catholicism
is still a literate faith. I wonder if the sea-change going on within me is indicative of something in movement beneath the
placid – or it may be, stupid and besotted – surface of modern society? Our leaders lurch from one disaster to
the next, their hands streaming with the blood of victims and their eyes veiled with self-conceit, with their sycophants of
the media ever chirping in the background. Adults have vacated the stage of the world. I think there are possibly only two
places in the West where one may find adults: and those two places are the Internet and the Catholic Church. Even then one
has to go looking for them, and do a bit of sifting and discerning, because of course there are dangerous children in these
places as well. There are dangerous children everywhere – men and women who have been released from the constraints
of tradition, faith, reason and morality and who have embarked on some new venture of shaping reality according to their ideas.
It matters not in the least that many in this current crop of "elected leaders" profess to believe in God, or that many who
profess to be God-believers elected them to manage the affairs of the nation.
In my view, what these supposed god-fearing leaders are telling us is that Protestant Christianity as a viable
branch of Christianity has collapsed. Of course there are many good Protestants and bad Catholics in the world today, but
on the whole Protestantism accommodated to rationalism more than Catholicism, and it is this accommodationism which has proved
its undoing. And of course, having adapted itself to rationalism – that is, dividing reason from morals – opened
up a process of rationalization for which, in Protestantism, there could be no check or constraint. For the teaching authority,
the Magisterium, had been thrown overboard. And the Protestants forever chastised the Catholics on the issue of the authority
of the Pope while failing to realize that the logic of their own beliefs permits everyone to become his own Pope! So now we
have as many popes as there are people . . . a nation of "autonomous individuals." But where is the nation? And where the
mysterious unity of personhood? Somehow the Catholic Church managed to preserve these concepts within her own mysterious unity
for two thousand years. Though wounded today, she still survives… It is a miracle.
Three years ago I left my native city Birmingham, in Alabama, to move to Philadelphia. No need to detail
the personal reasons for this move at this point. But one thing has become clear to me lately, and that is, the Philadelphia
region and the Birmingham region represent two very different demographic realities with respect to the Protestant-Catholic
populations. When I first moved here I thought that the best thing about Philadelphia was its Quaker heritage. There is much
in this heritage that is admirable and pure, and I became a member of a Quaker congregation and still attend, though not as
often as I once did. My more recent musings are leading me to the belief that the best thing about Philadelphia is its large
Catholic presence.
My ideas, you see, have changed, are changing. What is happening to America, in America, has caused me to
subject the entire Protestant heritage to a radical and searching questioning. My questioning is not so much about the Protestant
denominations themselves as it is about the quality of our culture, the quality of thinking itself. I am reminded, in this
regard, of a sentence I read in a New Yorker article some years ago, to the effect that it is not that so much of American
culture is bad, that we should worry about, but that so little of it is good. What is this mysterious goodness in thinking
– independence of mind combined with interdependence and sense of mutuality, clarity, lucidity, charity, forbearance,
openness to reality, balance, proportionality, loyalty to something beyond the self . . . ? Where do you find these qualities
today? Do you find them at all in the tomes of our "intellectuals…"?
Well, let’s see . . . I was reading Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, by
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger -- the new Pope, Benedictus XVI. His writing almost brought tears to my eyes. It is so lucid, with
every word and every sentence counting for something. He writes: "… obeying Christ means obeying his body, obeying him
in his body… the obedience to Jesus [is] a matter of overcoming Adam’s disobedience… Only in this way can
the renunciation of idolizing oneself be given concrete form… In an age in which emancipation is regarded as the true
heart of redemption, and freedom appears as the right to do everything I myself want to, and only that, the concept of obedience
is, so to speak, anathematized. It has been excised, not merely from our vocabulary, but from our thinking. Yet this conception
of freedom is the very thing that has made people incapable of living with one another, incapable of loving…"
And by contrast: at the end of Quaker Meeting last Sunday, a Friend got up to say that he had attended some
religious conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls or the gnostic gospels or some such, which proved to his mind that the Christian
Church (read: Catholic Church) was "just a disaster." And he shrugged, making a gesture of sheer contempt.
Frankly, I prefer the Catholic to the Quaker Pope. I sense that Protestant rationalism and even its step-child,
Quaker puritanism, are forces that are devouring the world and all that is good in it. It is not that they "mean" to do it,
and it is not that they do not offer standards. It is just that the standards they offer do not fully encompass the act of
thinking. They fail at incarnation, at being fully incarnated in the body, in history and in morals. It is a strange paradox
that the Mysteries must be guarded by these tangible reminders. But get rid of the tangibles and you are left not with the
intangible Mystery, but with a horde of self-appointed little popes speaking the language of derision.
May 5, 2005 --"Integrated Energy"
The unifying concept of this website is Peak Oil: which is the expression used to describe or depict the concept of finite
energy resources. "Peak" is what happens to an oil resource when it has been approximately depleted to the half-way point.
The decreasing pressure in the oil basin causes the remaining oil in the basin to become ever more difficult to extract. I
am speaking here of "conventional," i.e. liquid oil. "Tar sands" and "oil shale" demand an entirely different extraction method,
one more akin to mining than to drilling - again, another situation representing escalating costs.
The "peak oil" concept was discovered by the American geologist M. King Hubbert, who predicted back in 1956 that
oil would peak in North America in the early 1970's. People laughed at the time but his prediction proved to be correct. It
seems to me that American foreign policy cannot be understood without a grasp of the Hubbert's peak concept, because most
of the world's remaining oil is in the Middle East. At this time one of the big arguments in the Peak Oil field concerns
the Ghawar reservoir in Saudi Arabia, the largest reservoir in the world. Matt Simmons, an energy investment entrepreneur
and independent energy researcher, is soon to publish a book on Saudi Arabian reserves - a book that will no doubt throw cold
water on the idea that Ghawar can keep pumping forever. Ghawar is in fact filling with water, though maybe it's salt water,
not cold water. One of the devices to increase the oil flow in a reservoir is to flood it with water to increase the pressure.
This idea may have been devised by American oil advisers, ever in the forefront of good stewardship practices. (Caution: incident
of sarcasm) Anyway, flooding the reservoir with water does increase the flow of oil for a while but it ultimately damages
the reservoir. According to Aesop, this practice is called "killing the goose that laid the golden egg." I don't think the
American oil advisers had ever encountered the Aesopian theory in their business school curriculum..
Well, to resume the historical overview of this website. Energy is fundamental to life on earth, and human beings of
course need it and use it. There is no question that oil has become the foundation of modern life - you can hardly emerge
from your house without encountering the danger of being run over by a car, and cars need oil. So do homes and machines and
just about everything else. So talking up the importance of oil and energy became an important theme of many of my website
postings. Another theme I have explored is our attitudes about energy resources and depletion, which relate to our attitudes
about life on earth, science, religion - just about everything. The key term "energy" encompasses a vast range of phenomena,
and doing this website has involved me in a process of integrating these various strands. Thus the real title of this
website is "Integrated Energy" - although I have not posted this title. I think it is probably already in use, and besides,
it sounds like a software company.
There is physical energy and there is moral energy. But where physical energy is tangible and measurable and at least
can be brought forward with an array of facts and figures - although many people may still dispute them - moral energy is
far more difficult to grasp. Human life takes place in a context of moral energy, although it is not called that. It is rather
called other things, like intellectual or cultural life, society, tradition, manners, customs, religion, ethnicity, language,
expectations... Really, there is quite a long list of things that could be explored under the rubric of "moral energy." It
is interesting that the Greek word for "custom" was ethos (short 'e') and the word for "character" was ethos
(long 'e') --
the Greek language had two different letters for 'e.' In the Latin, mors, mores, i.e. "morality," covered
both of these terms. I cannot but think that the devolution of these two Greek terms into the single Latin concept represented
a kind of mental impoverishment.
There seems to be only a finite energy available to human beings. The Greeks used theirs for building up a rich culture
of philosophy, the Romans used theirs to build up an Empire.
In thinking about energy today, I have become increasingly troubled about how we Americans are deploying our "moral
energy." This has caused a certain shift in the nature of the writings I have been posting to this website. It is as
if, in talking about oil, I had to talk about morals; and in talking about morals, I discovered I had to talk about feminism.
For it seems to me that the feminists now control most of the universities in the USA in one form or another, with the possible
exception of "hard science" (and this in itself is controversial - just look at the feminist condemnation of Lawrence Summers,
who pointed this out) and that the reason Peak Oil is not better understood in the USA is because the feminists are standing
in the way. This seems, at first blush, to be a ridiculous charge. What could feminism possibly have to do with Peak Oil?
I think there is a case to be made, a line to be drawn, but it cannot be done quickly. Only in little steps, little forays,
into culture and practice and philosophy, can the multiform threads that link physical and moral energy be brought up
from their subterranean hiding places. And indeed feminism itself is but an outgrowth of that liberationist philosophy of
the Enlightenment that E. Michael Jones has exhaustively explored in his book, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation
and Political Control, reviewed on this website. Reading that book was the commencement of these new pathways
of exploration for me. "Integrated Energy" remains as true as it always was - only in the future, I suspect, the emphasis
will shift from primarily being a commentary on the implications of depleting physical energy resources to that of depleting
moral energies. Stay tuned.
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